British Murder Mysteries: J. S. Fletcher Edition (40+ Titles in One Volume). J. S. Fletcher

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СКАЧАТЬ leading the unkempt horse was in itself a picture. It stood, a small but very old farmhouse, with a high sloping roof, dormer windows, and tall chimneys, in t he angle made by the meeting of two roads; before i t lay a flower-garden, in one corner of which rose an ancient cedar-tree; behind it stretched a wide-spreading orchard, filled, for the most part, with cherry-trees, just then in the full glory of pink and white blossom. I immediately in front of it, on the opposite side of the highway, rose a great grove of chestnut-trees; they, too, were in bloom, and the wax-like clusters made little pyramids of light against the, glossy green of the widespreading leaves. And over everything was the clear blue of the May sky, and in the hedgerows and the coppices were the first signs of the flowering of the hawthorn.

      Pippany Webster saw nothing of all this. He shambled slowly round the corner of the high-road into the lane which led towards the woods, and made a boundary on that side to Perris's farmstead, into which he let himself by a ramshackle door that opened on a range of dilapidated buildings. These buildings stood between the old house and the cherry orchard; the lane ran at the back of them; a farm-fold lay in front of them, fenced off from the rear of the house by a low stone wall. Against this wall, on the fold side, was a stone trough; above it a leaden spout projected through the wall; on the other, the house side of the wall, was a pump, which communicated with the well below. The human animals in the house and the brute animals in the field both drank water from a spring thirty feet beneath them, into which the runnings of fold and byre and stable percolated in some indefinite degree about which neither ever speculated.

      The range of buildings into which Pippany Webster dragged the newly-shod horse was characteristic of what is usually seen on a small holding when the holder is poor and more or less shiftless. Between it and the house stood a dilapidated Dutch barn, empty of aught but a mess and litter of straw on the earth flooring almost as empty was the range of buildings itself when entered and inspected. The lower part was stable, cow-house, piggery so far as one-half was concerned; above these offices was a granary, and next it a chamber wherein wool might be stored; the other half of the range, unfloored from earth to roof face, made a barn which was nearly as destitute of straw as its Dutch substitute outside. Two horses in the stable, three cows in the byre, a few pigs in the sty, constituted Perris's live stock; but outside in the fold, and in the adjoining orchard, his wife kept a pretty good establishment of poultry—fowls, ducks, and geese—and at various times made a little money out of it. It was well that she had some such stand-by, for the evidences of prosperity at Cherry-trees were few. An observer, skilled in matters of farming, having taken due stock of the animals, the condition of the fold, the emptiness of barns and granary, the poor bits of dead stock, ploughs, harrows, and the like, which lay rusting and woe-begone of appearance in a lean-to shed, would have sniffed and turned up his nose with a remark as to the folly of trying to work even fifty acres without capital.

      Pippany Webster unceremoniously turned the horse into a stable as destitute of straw on the bouldered floor as it was empty of aught to eat in the broken mangers. The horse looked into the manger, and at the rack fixed in the wall above it, and turning its head gazed at Pippany. It knew as well as Pippany knew that it and its stable companion would presently be cast forth for the night into the adjoining grass meadow, and that as the spring nights were still nipping cold it was only right and just that something more warming to the belly than buttercups and daisies should be served up before the casting forth took place. And Pippany recognised the look and wagged his head.

      "Then ye mun wait till I can cut some o' yon owd clover," he said. "Theer's none so much left, and when it's done wi' ye'll hev' to depend on what ye can pick up—if so be as ye're alive. There's nowt much of owt left about this here place."

      As if in proof of this assertion he lifted the lid of the old stable-chest in which the horse-corn was kept, and gazed meditatively at its contents. In the depths of the chest lay two or three bushels of meal: Pippany remembered that there was none left in the granary above the stable; he remembered, too, that he had only enough pig-meal left wherewith to feed the pigs that night. He scratched his head dubiously.

      "This is a bonny come-up!" he soliloquised. "If t' maister doesn't come home to-morrow and bring soome brass wi' him these here animals 'll go fro' bad to worse—if such is possible! Howsomever, I mun cut some o' yon clover for t' hosses and t' cows."

      From a nook behind the corn-chest Pippany brought forth a hay-cutting knife, and proceeded to put an edge on it with a whetstone which he took from a hole in the wall. And at last, armed with this and with a stable fork whereupon he meant to impale the chunk of dried clover which he intended to carve out of the old stack at the end of the orchard, he went forth into the fold and crossed over to the orchard gate.

      In the orchard, amidst the pink and white of the cherry-trees, two women were hanging out the last results of a day's family washing. The lines to which they suspended the various articles of clothing, drawn wet and heavy from the wicker basket which they had just set down on the grass, were fastened here and there to the trunks or branches of the trees, here and there to certain ancient posts which were shaky in their foundations, and looked as if a little extra weight on the lines would pull them down altogether. There was scarcely any movement of air in the orchard; the lighter garments stirred but feebly when they were safely pinned to the line, the heavy ones hung straight down, motionless and inert.

      Of the two women thus employed when Pippany entered the orchard, one, the elder, Tibby Graddige, general odd-job woman to the parish, was a tall, spare, athletic female whose every action indicated energy and strength. When she moved, every muscle and sinew of her body seemed to be brought into play; hands moved in unison with feet, and elbows with knees. Just as active were the motions of her thin, straight lips and her coal-black eyes; the way in which her hair, equally black, was drawn in straight, severe fashion from her forehead and hidden behind an old cap fashioned from the remains of some shred of funeral crape indicated her views of life and of a day's work, which were to keep going at both until both were over. She passed now from basket to line and from line to basket as if everything of importance in the world depended upon the swiftness with which the wet linen was hung out to dry.

      The other and younger woman, Rhoda Perris, wife of Pippany's absent master, was of a different order of femininity. She looked to be about two-and-twenty years of age; the print gown which she wore did little to hide a figure which sculptors would have had nothing to find fault with had it been suggested to them as a model for the statue of something between a Venus and a Diana. Above the medium height, generous of bosom and hip, there was yet a curious suggestion of lissom slenderness about her which was heightened by the print gown. Her uncovered hair, catching the glint of the westering sun, revealed tints of gold and red and brown accordingly as her head was turned; it fell away to her ears in natural undulations from a centre parting, and was carelessly bound up into a heavy coil at the nape of her neck. Beneath the low, square forehead which the ripples of this elusively-tinted hair shaded were a pair of large eyes, the colour of which was as elusive as the hair—at times they seemed to be violet, at times grey, at times green. Always there was in them a strange sleepy seductiveness and a curious steadiness of gaze when they fixed themselves upon the object of their possessor's thoughts. The nose was in the slightest degree retrousse, the mouth inclining to largeness but perfectly shaped, the chin firm and rounded. As for the woman's colour it was that of the healthy, full-blooded human animal whose surroundings from infancy have been those of the woods and fields, and into whom the spirit of free air and the strength of the earth has entered with all the stirring nourishment of mother's milk.

      Rhoda Perris, idly hanging a garment on the clothesline, looked round as Pippany shambled through the rickety gate. She took a clothes-peg from between her strong, white teeth, and smiled sideways at Tibby Graddige.

      "Seems to me it takes a nice long time to put one shoe on a horse nowadays, Pippany Webster," she remarked. "You took that horse down to the crossroads at one o'clock, and it's past five now."

      "T' smith weren't theer when I landed," said Pippany sullenly. "He were away up to Mestur Spink's about summat or other. An' when he СКАЧАТЬ